My paper titled “Representation Learning for Discovering Phonemic Tone Contours” was recently presented at the SIGMORPHON workshop, held concurrently with ACL 2020. This is joint work with Jing Yi Xie and Frank Rudzicz.
Problem: Can an algorithm learn the shapes of phonemic tones in a tonal language, given a list of spoken words?
Answer: We train a convolutional autoencoder to learn a representation for each contour, then use the mean shift algorithm to find clusters in the latent space.
By feeding the centers of each cluster into the decoder, we produce a prototypical contour that represents each cluster. Here are the results for Mandarin and Chinese.
We evaluate on mutual information with the ground truth tones, and the method is partially successful, but contextual effects and allophonic variation present considerable difficulties.
For the full details, read my paper here!
Lucky's Notes 